EUROSPEECH '97
5th European
Conference on Speech Communication and Technology

Rhodes, Greece
September 22-25, 1997

Prosodic Modelling in Text-to-Speech Synthesis

Jan P. H. van Santen

Bell Labs-Lucent Technologies, USA

This paper discusses three broad obstacles that must be overcome
to improve prosodic quality in text-to-speech systems.
First, direct and indirect limits set by the signal processing ("synthesis")
components. Second, combinatorial and statistical constraints
inherent in generalizing from training corpora to unrestricted
domains, and that require the integration of contentspecific
knowledge and detailed mathematical modeling. Third,
the nature of many empirical research issues that must be solved
for prosodic modeling to improve: they are often too focused
and model-dependent for academe, and too long-term for development
organizations.